Tag: solar explorer

The latest version of Solar Explorer brings you the the dwarf planet Eris, some random improvements, and of course, bug fixes. Adding the dwarf planet Eris to Solar Explorer proved to be a great deal of work. Immediately after adding it, the first run showed Eris passing dangerously near Saturn at its closest approach to the Sun. It shouldn’t

In January 2006, the New Horizon spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral on a decade long journey to visit Pluto. In late August of the same year, about mid-way between Mars and Jupiter, the little probe would have received word that Pluto had been re-classified a “dwarf planet”. Approximately eight years have passed since then. In

The new version of Solar Explorer has been completely reworked to support the French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese languages. I’ve started with these because they are all based on the latin character set, which is supported by the font that’s built into the app. To support the new languages, I’ve opted to use excerpts from

Today’s update to Solar Explorer includes “space dust”, which are subtle, random dust particles that fly past the camera whenever it is moving. The intention is to give the impression that there is movement in the gaps between planets. It really only shows up when in free flight mode because the camera moves so fast when jumping

With the camera issues fixed in the previous version, I’m now able to add a long requested feature to Solar Explorer: manual flight control. Access to manual flight control is from the new and improved toolbar at the bottom of the screen. I’ve moved the “Planets”, “Asteroids” and “Spacecraft” buttons into a combined “Mode” button

The gimbal lock problem has finally been fixed. This bug intermittently caused the camera’s Y axis to come into alignment with its X axis. When it happened, it would appear as if the camera became trapped in a narrow band around the equator of a planet. I eventually found that it was caused by three different bugs. Two

Occasionally, I’m asked why Solar Explorer doesn’t use a linear scale. The short answer is that I have yet to think of a way to do it. Imagine if the Sun was shown filling a mobile phone screen, making it about 9 cm or 3.5 inches in size. At this scale, Pluto would be over 300 m or 984

After 12 months of work, the rewrite of both versions of Solar Explorer in Unity are now complete. For those who don’t know the story, the original version of the app was written with Shiva. About 18 months ago, the company that created Shiva had some financial issues. Due to local laws, there was no need

Another big piece of work is out of the way with planet structures added to the new Unity code. I’ve made the interface operate the same way as it did previously – clicking the structure button spins the planet around to show the interior. I like the idea of making it interactive rather than displaying

I’ve made some modifications to Solar Explorer HD to allow for a new spacecraft section. This allowed me to release a new version yesterday with a new and improved Voyager model. The original model had the lowest number of polygons I could manage at the time I created it, approximately 2K. This meant that the